Introduce breakout room functionality
We have a business requirement for breakout rooms with live events. The idea is pretty simple - we plan to use live events to host internal staff training webinars and as part of that, at times we will ask for small groups of people (typically 4-5) to go away into a breakout room and come back to the group with their answer/idea.
We would like to see this functionality be introduced to Microsoft Teams for not only live events but also video calls. This would provide feature parity with pre-existing tools such as Zoom, WebEx and many more which would be a cost saving for us.
Features we would expect as part of breakout rooms would be as follows:
- Option to assign users to a specific room
- Option to random assign users to a specific room
- Presenters/producers can switch between rooms
- Breakout rooms have a time limit for how long they last before everyone being bought back to the group
- The ability to appoint a moderator of a breakout room
- The ability to record each and every room separately (This is a dream ask)
Happy to provide more detail as required.
Aaron Hatton
shared this idea
We are excited to announce that Breakout Rooms are now generally available for all customers. For more information, please check out our new blog post available here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/breakout-rooms-is-now-generally-available-in-microsoft-teams/ba-p/1968481
Thank you all for your feedback on this highly requested feature.
1111 comments
Comments are closed-
Felecia
commented
Breakout rooms (not channels) would be very helpful, along with making sure all team owners can manipulate them not just the organizer.
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Bander Alyami
commented
I am a professor at the University of Cincinnati. I reached my manager asking why we don't switch to Teams instead of WebEx for meetings and webinars because we really like Teams. He stated that the reason why we still use WebEx was because of the breakout sessions feature. Teams should consider having this feature like the one in WebEx or better. Hope my voice is heard.
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Anonymous
commented
El último wrokshop que hice le pasado 26 de Noviembre fue un total desastre por no tener esta funcionalidad. Es INDISPENSABLE para poder hacer una buena reunión.
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Anonymous
commented
Even Webex has this feature now. While waiting to release this feature, MS has been eclipsed by Webex, which is saying something if Cisco can develop, test and release this faster.
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Anonymous
commented
Why is this feature getting pushed back? First we were told 'Coming this fall' which I presume means Autumn 2020. Then it was October, then November and now December. How many more times will it be delayed?
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René
commented
We'll have to host an event with the use of breakout rooms in the beginning of January. Need to know the ETA of this functionality to be able to create content on forehand.
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Oliver
commented
Does a User needs to have a Team or are breakout rooms also available in Teams Meeting "only"? Like if I use the Outlook Add-in to schedule a meeting.
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Anonymous
commented
Hi do we and can we have Breakout rooms when running Collaborative workshops?
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Anonymous
commented
hope to get an update!
Workshop on december 1st would really benefit from this! -
Anonymous
commented
This really needs to be resolved quickly, the pressure from users to introduce Zoom until this is released is overwhelmin, my fear is if we release Zoom there will be no going back.
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Gerard
commented
You have no idea how hard it is pushing back users who are pressuring to use Zoom over Teams solely because Breakout Rooms keeps being pushed back, October to November now December.
I'm lucky I have an advanced copy and it works a treat. Please push it out early to protect me from the bread of Zoom.......
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Anonymous
commented
Please can we have an update on Breakout rooms - what is coming and when. So many staff are wanting to use it.
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[Deleted User]
commented
Thanks for working on this. This will be much appreciated by our organization.
It's better to wait for a stable feature rather than start complaining about a rushed and unstable one.
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Anonymous
commented
Disappointing lack of transparency here as the rollout has slipped from October to November and now to December. Obviously something that is of critical importance to many and it would be good to hear from the product team as to why this has happened and a realistic idea of when this will be available.
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Anonymous
commented
I would like to have some more efficient options for controlling breakout rooms:
1) option to delete all existing breakout rooms
2) option to auto-assign participants to rooms even when the rooms already exist
3) option to unassign all participants from existing rooms
4) option to move participant between rooms without having to close the room first
5) option to share photos and files with breakout rooms -
Elizabeth Barclay
commented
Any date for release to the Canadian market yet?
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Daija
commented
please allow presenters to move between rooms, currently presenters have to be placed in a room if there is more than one presenter
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Max T. Jensen
commented
Too late. Zoom won the trust and place in my organisation :(
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Anonymous
commented
We decided to keep using Teams for our classes as the promised this feature would be available the semester. It is not and that is disturbing
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Anonymous
commented
Hello,
This is sadly a reason why MS continues to fall behind. All of your competitors have this feature. It is long overdue. I hope that you can rectify this as it is a great feature and would add so much to the experience of Teams.